This invention relates generally to online advertising, and in particular to selecting social endorsement information to provide to a user of a social networking system in conjunction with an online advertisement.
Online advertising has evolved into a profitable business, allowing commercial and private entities alike to place advertisements on websites and within native applications, and then display the advertisements to viewing users who access the websites and applications. The ability to analyze data associated with a particular website, application, and/or the viewing user has allowed advertisers to provide ads that are more relevant to a viewing user's interests. More relevant ads increase the likelihood of ad conversion (e.g., that the viewing user will observe the ad, click on the ad, proceed to the advertiser's website, or otherwise respond to the ad with the intended result) and/or the likelihood of greater demand for or awareness of the advertiser's goods or services, thereby raising the effectiveness of the ad.
Ad targeting attempts to increase ad conversion by showing ads that are more relevant to the viewing user's interests. Ads accompanied by social context, such as information about a friend's activities related to the thing being advertised, may further increase the relevance of the ads. Although providing social context information in conjunction with an advertisement increases the advertisement's effectiveness, for any given individual there may be an abundance of social context information available. Current ad systems lack the ability to select the most relevant and effective social information to provide as a social context, or social endorsement, in conjunction with an ad. Therefore, there is a need for a comprehensive solution to identify candidate social endorsements and select the most relevant and effective to provide as social endorsement information in conjunction with advertisements.